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Please scroll down for Dr. Wolf's Daemen fall 2007 Key-note speech--thank you.
Daemen fall 2007 Key-note Speech by Dr. Howard Wolf, University of Buffalo, New York and Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK:
I want to make some remarks about a few general distinctions between nonfiction and fiction from the point of view of someone who has worked in both genres over many years and then to offer examples of my work in the hope that these readings (brief, I assure you) will make these distinctions clear.
I’ll probably let these excerpts speak for themselves unless some “flash of firefly” insight comes to me while I am reading them (Gordimer, The Art of the Short Story, eds. Gioia &Gwynn, 346). I offer these readings as much for entertainment as an illustration.
I should say at the outset that the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction are not hard and fast. Indeed, it seems clear to me that one and the same mind and personality always are behind the scenes, whether one is trying to stick to facts and events (objective material) or sailing towards an imaginary horizon (subjective) – one set of terms in which journalistic nonfiction and fiction usually are differentiated.
The fountain of our development issues in many fonts – so to speak. Our “unconscious,” or its neurological equivalent, a kind of water-table, irrigates the imagination in whatever genre we choose to write (SarahLyall, “Still Pinteresque,” Arts&Lesisure, The New York Times, Sunday, October 7, 2007, 1, 16).
Whether a writer chooses to look at an “exterior” or “interior” landscape in the world -- and many writers (Hemingway, DorisLessing) do both in a lifetime – he or she does so from the point of view of the same “I”
(Gordimer, The Story and its Writer, 7th Edition, ed. Ann Charters, 504).
But this is not a static model – for the “I” has many levels, and the writer doesn’t always write from or @ the same level. And each “level,” if we choose this spatial metaphor, can be described from a different angle
(Lessing, The Story and Its Writer, 785). In this sense, we can say that there are one and many Is – to say nothing of “yous” as in “yous guys.”
There is the “I” of dreams, the “I” of the open road, and the “I” of lyric
poetry. Each can be an arrow in the same writer’s quiver.
This practical approach puts many vexing philosophical problems in
contemporary criticism on solid ground. We are not forced to opt for
“naturalism” against “surrealism,” for example.
So various a writer as EugeneO’Neill, in an attempt to understand the “early forces that had shaped him” sketched a diagram (appended) in which the first two stages are “nirvana” and “birth” (Sheaffer 506). His characters speak in many voices and wear many masks, but they are all reaching, in some way, for a lost unity of being.
And George Orwell, so devoted to the facts of life, as understood from the point of view of British socialism, says about the writer in “Why I Write”: “…but if he escapes from his early influence altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write” (Orwell 311). This is one reason why Orwell could not have been a blind adherent of any system.
The two movements of writing – centripetal and centrifugal – if I may invoke Newton’s Laws of Motion in a somewhat analogical way – have a common center towards which or away from they move. Whether inward turning (first person and autobiographical) or outward spinning (third person and reportorial), a common eye (and latent “I”) is doing the seeing.
A writer lives in two connecting rooms.
Henry James says of Browning that he “lived equally on both sides of an inner wall which ‘contained an invisible door through which, working the lock at will, he could swiftly pass’” (The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. Two: Third Edition, 2006, pp.1408-1411).
Browning is, in fact, an interesting case. His dramatic monologues are at once centripetal and centrifugal. In creating masks of selfhood, Browning takes the reader “inside” his created characters; to the extent that his characters are personae, the creative vector is “outside” of the writer’s observable biography. The dramatic monologues are objectively realized subjectivities. This is related to, but not quite the same thing as,
Huck Finn.
And I think it’s true to say that each vector creates the possibility, perhaps necessity, for a counter-movement: if writers set out to create fictive world, they tend to reach back or towards fact and observable circumstances give to give weight and plausibility to their imagined worlds. If they begin with data and matter, they are likely to gravitate towards design, form, and invention. This balance holds both implosion and explosion in check – a momentary stay against fusion and confusion
(sounds good?).
Steven Pinker’s work would seem to confirm what writers (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”) have known through the ages: that perception “comes from reality, but is organized and reorganized by the minds…the dialectic of creativity and reality-testing has taken us far beyond other animals…” (William Saletan, “The Double Thinker,” a review of The Stuff of Thought, The New York Times Book review, September 23, 2007, 14).
Some writers work at the extreme of the polarity: DeFoe and John McPhee; Kafka and Calvino. But there are few, if any, works which are either pure form or pure matter. An exclusive commitment to one edge of the narrative spectrum can lead to a parody of realism, the other a mockery of experiment.
What I am talking about here is not the genre in which the writer works – history as fiction (Doctorow) or fiction as history (Coetzee’s Foe) – but the writer’s perception and representation of experience as he or she interprets it.
The determining narrative issue is not whether the writer writes in the first or third person or whether the narrator claims to be telling the truth or leading us through a maze of uncertainties; the issue is: what kind of epistemological exploration (EE)awaits us as we enter the writer’s world.
Let me immodestly propose a modest formula: [EE] x Nta (genre) =
Fiction; [EE] x NTb (genre) = Nonfiction (in which “NT” stands for
“narrative techniques”). What this illustrates is that the factors that fiction and nonfiction are essentially technical ones, not matter of vision or sensibility.
The writer’s eye is focused, not transparent, with all due respect to my beloved Emerson. He or she may make use of a microscope in one mode (centripetal-autobiographical) and a telescope in the other (centrifugal-reportorial), but a unique pair of eyes with specific ocular pressure – the visual equivalent of a unified personality --always is doing the looking.
Needless to say, the status of what I’m calling a “unified personality” is itself part of what we’ve come together to investigate. A defense of it is implicit in my commentary and readings, though it’s not what I’ve come here to do.
Still, I think it’s important to say that recent research in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, the evolution of morality, and genetics have made many, if not most, of the postmodernist and deconstructive assumptions of recent decades quite tenuous – if not, in hindsight, somewhat perverse. Stanley Fish’s kind of postmodernism is likely to become less and less persuasive in the years to come, if it will have any legs at all
(Edward Rothstein, “Moral Relativity Is a Hot Topic?,” NYT, July 13, 2002, A13, A15). Fish has a criticism, but not an anatomy, or do I date myself in saying this?
In the mid-1970’s a UB colleague, who since has moved on to one of the Himalayan peaks of academe (not Harvard), told me at a cocktail party in her own voice – it has an unmistakable pitch – that neither she nor I had an intrinsic character. I was puzzled by her remark since we were talking and I had been raised to believed that talked to real people, not specters or holograms.
But decorum insisted that I listen patiently for a minute or two. I never felt guilty or rude about avoiding her after that since she had told me, after all, that neither of us existed. I must add that some years later this person told me in a mournful tone that her father had died. I expressed proper sympathy for the loss, but was tempted to ask for whom she was grieving and who was grieving.
As Bernard Berenson locates the hand of the “master” in the smallest brushstrokes -- his notion of “connoisseurship” – so we can hear the signature tonalities of a composer in whatever he or she is writing. As different as Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “Quiet City” are from each other, we recognize immediately that we are hearing his musical equivalent of voice.
Anyone who ever has heard Billy Holiday sing will agree with me, I think. Whether she is singing “Life Begins When You’re in Love” or
“Let’s Dream in the Moonlight,” one can hear her particular vocal quality that blends sadness, longing, suffering, vulnerability, passion, and so much more into one voice. Her “soul’s subterranean depth” is present in each note (Matthew Arnold, “The Buried Life”).
All great popular singers –perhaps more than classical singers – tell their stories, however compressed, in an unmistakable voice. Lacking, as a rule, professional training of a standard kind, they must rely on their personalities; and because the lyrics are so attenuated, the mood must carry what the words only can intimate. And this may suggest why most writers begin as poets: adolescents feel more than they are able to articulate in any systematic way.
And this unity of voice is true, of course, for writing. Whether we are reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s subjective and somewhat interior “My Lost City” or his objectively rendered and historically informed conclusion to The Great Gatsby, we hear the common music of his style – that most elusive and yet defining aspect of a writer’s work and the possibilities for that work within any literary epoch (a subject which T.S. Eliot discusses in his 1942 essay, “The Music of Poetry”).
Whether we are reading Hemingway’s personal A Moveable Feast or his somewhat Jamesean rendering of Harry’s mind in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” we hear the unmistakable voice of the wounded and vulnerable matador who may or may not be able to face the bull with grace and courage one last time.
The contemporary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami says something like this: “Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist” (“Jazz Messenger,” The New York Times Book Review, July 8, 2007, 27).
Ronald Blythe, a brilliant, but minor writer whom I stumbled upon recently, says in a wonderful essay, “An Inherited Perspective” (Characters and Their Landscape 4): “I do not want the first knowledge
<of landscapes and places>, wherein lies all the heart and the magic, to
give way entirely to the second knowledge, wherein lie all the facts.”
This comment resonates, of course, with Orwell’s “Why I Write.”
Now that I’ve said something about the underlying unity of a writer’s world, whether he or she works as a writer of fiction or nonfiction, and the co-existence of the “two forces” (centripetal and centrifugal) -- a coexistence which is signaled by the contemporary use of the term “creative nonfiction” – let me say something about the psychological and pragmatic matters that distinguish writing fiction from nonfiction and then give some examples from my own recent work.
When I first started thinking about this presentation, I was reading
Willaims James’s 1902 classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Hence, the title of this talk. And in a first draft, I tried to make use of his
categories, but then I realized that they didn’t work because they dealt with religious, not creative experience, though the two realms are not unrelated for James.
He makes room importantly for what he calls “the subconscious self” (511), a new concept at the time of his writing. Freud had not yet given his famous 1909 lectures at Clark University, thus bringing the “subconscious to America,” at which occasion he met William James, then gravely ill, who said famously to Freud: “The future of psychology belongs to your work” (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, eds. Trilling and Marcus, 1961, pp. 267-268).
James says, “Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time
aware of” (511). I would prefer the term “creative personality,” but the
point is that James recognizes the underlying unity that I have been talking about. Still, I realized that Freud more than James is related to my presentation today.
Freud’s Civilizations and Its Discontents, more than James’s classic, divides, as it were, my nonfiction from my fiction. My nonfiction is more in the service of “civilization” and my fiction, as you shall see, owes more to “discontents,” as Freud develops the concept.
Decorum is the door that separates the two rooms for me, as it does, I am tempted to say, for all writers. There is always some ratio of revelation and concealment. It would be rare to read a biography of any
writer – indeed, I can’t think of one – in which some skeletons in the closet hadn’t been found, some secret revealed. Or, in the case of autobiography, some belated admission of a youthful indiscretion or worse. Gunther Grass’s participation in the Wehrmacht is a recent example. The Paul De Mann case is another.
No writer stands naked before the world. Some vulnerability or vanity is concealed. Jack Kerouac promoted a faux sense of spontaneity. He turned out to be a serious and, in his own way, a disciplined writer.
This concealment is especially true in the areas of eros and aggression.
We protect these deeply private areas of experience. We appear transgressive at the risk of disapproval, censure, banishment. As unvarnished as a writers may seem to appear, they protect some veneer of civilization in all its myriad forms. Even Tarzan would have worn a cutaway, had he gone to Stockholm to accept a Nobel Prize. Why this is so would require a study of primatology and social anthropology, and, even then, there still would be many puzzling questions about human behavior. Why do children like to build secret forts in dappled thickets at
edge of a woods?
Writers who wish to be authentic must work up Houdini like performances in which they can move freely within self-imposed restraints. As Emily Dickinson says, “Tell all the Truth but tell it
Slant – “ (Poem 1129).
With this as Preface, let me read, if there is any time, from some of my work that may make these contrastive narrative strategies somewhat more concrete.
I shall leave the final analyses and conclusions to you for publication in a journal that a late colleague called: Further Studies.
And now, Kara Manning:
Expatriated to the Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer, depicts a slightly fictionalized, auto-biographical account of Miller's first years as an expatriate in Paris. Among the fragmentary, surrealistic events Miller describes are his encounters with numerous whores, his associations with friends, his methods of acquiring food and money, his awkward and distant relationship with his wife, and his desire to become a writer. Most of the novel is fairly destitute in terms of a solidified plot; rather, it is made up of scenes jumping hither and thither through the dirty world of Depression-era Paris. As Louise DeSalvo writes in the novel's Introduction, "His Paris was not the Paris of Ernest Hemingway or of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miller, because of his self-imposed poverty, could describe a side of Paris that tourists (and even the expatriates who lived there before him) never saw (ix).
It is this stylistic and thematic use of the grotesquely foul, vulgar, and depraved which develops any thread of sense or meaning inherent to the novel, as it is juxtaposed to the idea that artists living in such a society can survive, create, and heal in a world permeated with death and decay. Additionally, the graphic vulgarity reveals Miller's contempt for convention, which is reflective of the avant-garde influences of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1930's, while the motif of cancerous destruction is suggestive of the degeneration of the principles of order touched upon by increasingly postmodernist writers. Tropic of Cancer, therefore, may be seen as something of a bridge novel between the modern and postmodern literary movements.
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From the first words of the novel, one becomes well aware that the use of blatant vulgarity will permeate the text...and that it will mean something. The opening scene describes Boris, a friend of Miller, as lice-ridden and as a prophet of doom and gloom. After Miller shaves Boris' armpits in an attempt to ward off the lice, Boris tells him, "there will be more calamities, more death, more despair....The cancer of time is eating us away....We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape" (23). Immediately following this scene, Miller indicates that "a year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am....There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character....a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will" (23). On the very first page, then, one may glean the novel's sense in its entirety. The foul is descriptively utilized to suggest that art is valid for art's sake, and that the act of creation is strengthening and healing.
The final words of the novel effectively bring this concept full circle. Miller has just assisted his friend, Fillmore, in leaving Paris to return to America. Having pocketed the money Fillmore meant for the French girl he impregnated, Miller considers that he, too, could return if he chose. Thinking and watching the Seine, "a great peace came over me....Christ, before my eyes there shimmered such a golden peace that only a neurotic could dream of turning his head away....I feel this river flowing through me–its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed" (285-6). The vulgarity and sexually explicit content of the preceding pages is juxtaposed to the pristine and natural imagery of the Seine in the final passages, indicating that Miller has survived as an artist in this despicable world, and has succeeded in producing what he insists is a non-book, a piece of non-art, which, through its creation, has served to bring him to a place of health, vitality, and peace.
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Critic Kingsley Widmer touches upon this idea when he says:
The nuclear Tropic of Cancer should be understood as the saga of an aging American failure who bootstraps himself into self- acceptance as an "Artist" by writing Tropic of Cancer. While the materials of the book are primarily destitution, loneliness, sordidness, and misery, the almost simultaneous writing about those experiences constitutes for Miller a joyous achievement. His way down becomes his way up. Thus he can affirmatively reverse many usual senses of suffering and other feeling. (2)
The stylistic and thematic use of nastiness is precisely what reveals Miller's novel to be inherently pure and life-giving, as the incongruities between filth and cleanliness, disease and health, death and life are culminated by the personal sense of peace and quiescence the author discovers. The often disturbingly graphic anecdotes, written as they are in a surrealistic, stream-of-conscious manner, grotesquely point to the ultimate sense of self which Miller finds as he gazes upon the Seine: "its course is fixed" (286), just as his own course is fixed now that he has sorted through the muck and dirt of his experiences to reach the possibility of life (in art).
It seems that manifestos of this kind were commonplace with American writers and artists who felt disgruntled with American life during the post-WWI years and the era of the Depression. So many American artists became expatriates that it is clear they were seeking something in them-selves that could not be found within the confines of the prevailing American society. Their rejection of America's social, moral, and economic ideals led them to niches in Europe where they could live and learn in a manner conducive to their creative impulses. To cite Widmer again, "Miller, with his usual angry asides for America–which defines much of the significance of his role abroad–claims that in Paris, at least, the viciousness of what is called 'making a living' lacks the
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hypocritical American claims of opportunity and liberty" (13). Exiling himself to an impoverished life in Paris effectively cleanses Miller's mind of the middle-class ideals of the American Dream which insist that success and wealth may be anyone's.
Throughout the novel, Miller inserts these "angry asides" about America or Americans into his anecdotal ramblings, and these often become rantings paired with vulgarity and profanity. For example, in one scene Boris is attempting to rent out his place and "it is a beautiful woman who has come to look at the apartment. An American, of course....Rich American cunts with paint boxes slung over their shoulders. A little talent and a fat purse....The beautiful American woman is inquiring about the toilet. The toilet! Let me show you, you velvet-snooted gazelle!" (47-8). This passage suggests the vicious resentment Miller feels towards the country of his birth, and the economic and social atmosphere generated there. In a later scene, Miller says, "I think it was the fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass again.... One of the big mucky-mucks from the other side of the water had decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses of his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied at the Ritz" (177). There is both irony and ire in this passage, as the day Americans consider to be a celebration of liberty and independence becomes the day on which they attempt to snatch freedom from one of their own. However, the anger and rebellion Miller directs towards America is one aspect of the healing process he puts himself through via artistic outlet and creation. It is the continuous, profane ranting and raving which allows him to consider returning to America at the end of the novel...and choosing not to. The dadaistic views Miller takes in this novel suggest that his daily mantra may have gone something like this: conventional, rich America bad! bohemian, poor Paris good! Of course, just as expatriation was beneficial and good for other American artists, so, too, did the choice of self-
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exile provide Henry Miller with opportunities for artistic and personal growth.
The nature of this growth, as reflected by the novel itself, is suggestive both of modernism and of postmodernism. The manner in which Miller writes, that is, his use of first person narrative to deliver an exposition of anecdotal events which are related in an often fragmentary and surreal stream-of-consciousness, is akin to the methods of some modernists, such as Faulkner. As Widmer states, "Fracturing provides his sensibility and his world. Disparate conjunctions provide his affirmations, as, indeed, they do in many of the modernist styles from which his often derive" 9). The obvious lack of chronology and order support that modernist contention that real life is a series of events in which information and meaning are gained at random. Additionally, Tropic of Cancer seeks truth within the mind of the individual as opposed to finding it, ultimately, within society. This may indicate that, for Henry Miller the author, becoming an expatriate was a way to give himself the time and space to find the truths expressed by Henry Miller the character.
However, the novel also reveals some of the postmodernist traits that would become more prevalent in later years. For instance, the autobiographical quality of the text provides an argument that it is edging into the cynical terrain of the postmodern novel. The disorder and vulgar explicitness inherent to Miller's work may also be seen as a sprinkling of postmodernist sentiment. The concept of the disintegration of the organizing principles of the world exist throughout the novel in its motif of disease and decay. Cancer and syphilis are the metaphoric equivalents to the crumbling structure of the universe. "If the discrete fragments and associations ...seem beyond order, then the very disorder...provides the quality of his 'anecdotal life.' If his misery threatens all meaning, then meaninglessness becomes the trumpeted meaning" (Widmer 9).
Nietzschean influence is scattered throughout the novel and is most apparent in certain passages. For example, "By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed...
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When he finds God...he is a skeleton....I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free" (104-5). As Nietzsche has widely been considered a precursor to the philosophies and beliefs of postmodernist writers, the obvious influence on Miller may also be taken as such, flavouring Tropic of Cancer with postmodernism, thereby making it a novel bridging the modernist and postmodernist movements.
The interesting publication history of Tropic of Cancer also gives it a place in the eras of both literary movements. Having been completed in 1932, the novel was published in English by the Obelisk Press in Paris in 1934. "Obscenity laws in England and the United States prohibited publication" (DeSalvo xv), again bringing Miller's blatant use of the grotesque and profane to the forefront of this novel's creation and existence. The time period in which the initial publication took place more closely corresponds to that in which modernism was most recognizable. Authors such as Hemingway (who has been increasingly considered not only a realist, but an author who additionally displays many modernist sensibilities) and Faulkner, for example, were writing and publishing novels in the 1920's and 1930's. Indeed, modernism held the literary stage until, perhaps, the late 1950's and early 1960's.
This is significant when one notes that "it wasn't until May 1961, when Miller was sixty-nine years old" (DeSalvo xvi) that court cases allowed novels which had previously been deemed obscene to be legally published in the United States. The Grove Press publication brought on censorship cases, however, and according to DeSalvo, "Miller did not rest easy until the June 1964 Supreme Court decision finding Tropic of Cancer 'not obscene'" (xvii). The novel's publication in America, then, parallels the time period during which postmodernism was on the rise in literature. Pynchon and Vonnegut, for instance, two of the postmodernist giants, were writing at precisely this time. Pynchon's V was published in 1961, as well, while Vonnegut's Cat's
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Cradle essentially established him as a postmodernist in 1963.
Despite the gap of nearly thirty years between its publication in Paris and its acceptance in the United States, Tropic of Cancer did not go unnoticed by Americans during the hiatus. DeSalvo notes, "Tropic of Cancer had a steady readership during World War II, and during the Occupation..." (xvi), and this fact is acceded by Widmer: "The book had a long and substantial intellectual as well as popular reputation (it sold substantially for decades in its Parisian editions– for example, thousands of American soldiers obtained copies, as I did, in Europe during World War II– before becoming a multimillion copy aboveground bestseller in the 1960s)" (18). That Americans avidly read Miller's novel and smuggled it into the United States, suggests that it possessed an intrinsic value which was readily recognizable to many members of the nation Miller so eagerly and violently rebukes in his book.
Some Americans, of course, may have simply enjoyed the previously-unheard-of sexually explicit content of Tropic of Cancer and the coarse vulgarity which seeps from its pages. However, because it is that stylistic and thematic use of the grotesquely vile which lends meaning (or perhaps, as we have seen, meaninglessness) to the novel, it may also be argued that Miller's readers found solace in the filth, just as Miller, himself, did. Clearly, artists are not the only ones to benefit from the healing properties of creation. As Miller and other artists struggled to find well-being in a dingy world full of death and decay, so, too, did the soldiers of WWII who witnessed the brutal realities of war. So, too, did the up-and-coming writers and artists in America who felt as disgruntled with their country as did Miller and the other expatriates. So, too, do those of us for whom the everyday atmosphere of American society seems lacking and stagnant. Just as Henry Miller brought himself peace through the creation of his art, so, too, do those of us who read it find repose in the mire.
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Works Cited
DeSalvo, Louise. Introduction. Tropic of Cancer. By Henry Miller. New York: Signet-Penguin Books, 1995. vii-xx.
Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. 1934. New York: Signet-Penguin Books, 1995.
Widmer, Kingsley. Henry Miller: Revised Edition. 1963. Ed. Warren French. Twayne's United States Authors Ser. 44. Boston: Twayne Publishers-G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.